


The Fighter

by Niconsernetta



Series: Fragments and False Starts [2]
Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 22:51:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Niconsernetta/pseuds/Niconsernetta
Summary: “I’m coming.” It was all that she had needed to stay strong, to speak to the authorities, but it hadn’t been enough to see her through until the end. She doesn’t know what to expect when she turns around, not really, she’s never met this stranger face to face but she knows this person better than she knows herself.





	The Fighter

_‘We were given to one another, two pieces of the same soul made to live in two bodies. We share the same skin, what is written on mine will appear on yours. Why must we wait to share our thoughts with one another when they were meant to resonate with one another in perfect harmony?’_ Kate’s parents recognize the words before she does the crude paraphrasing of a child beside the elegant calligraphic script of an adult who had taken both pride and pains to perfect the tricky art of penmanship. It was an unpopular sentiment when her parents were young, when it was common practice to give children colored pencils and crayons to prevent from revealing too much about themselves before they were old enough to understand the dangers.

As she grows older she begins to appreciate the absent minded way her soulmate uses their skin in the same manner that others use paper and diaries, reminders and messages and complex field equations evolved from simple mathematical principles she had either been too young or too uninterested to investigate. She knows her soulmate beyond the words they shared, conversations that lasted for days inter-spaced with rambling thoughts of increasing tangential leaps of logic that baffled the minds of any who glanced at her arms in passing. The shorthand her soulmate had developed with the sole intention of freeing up more space to record increasingly complex thoughts that required a specific kind of mental flexibility to understand.

Riley is facts and numbers while she is emotion and feeling. The simple pattern of numbers beginning with the first ten digits which made up the physical underlay of the world around them, beyond the majesty and beauty of sunrises and sunsets, followed shortly by multiplication tables and simple short cuts of division and so much more. Her soulmate is a mathematical protege her parents say, three years older and already so gifted in the scientific arts. Her soulmate is an unabashed nerd with a passion for computers and clocks, who could debate the merits of Star Wars verses Star Trek and the exact team combination for Pokemon to beat the single player content for days while arguing why Firefly was a masterpiece which needed to be finished.

Kate knows Riley better than she knows herself, she knows that Riley doesn’t like carrots but could eat nothing but broccoli and potatoes for a month and be content, she knows that Riley has had the same pet turtle for sixteen years, she knows that the only reason that Riley knows how to draw rabbits is because she liked them, she knows that Riley is ambidextrous because somehow Riley had managed to break an arm inside on a rainy day, she knows that Riley is a girl and that isn’t something that she can share with anyone. Not yet anyway.

When she’s five she learns that Riley’s parents are scientists but she doesn’t understand what that means until the other kids her age begin to communicate with their soulmates. Riley’s parents hadn’t believed in limiting or forbidding soulmates from communicating as soon as they were able too, while science still did not have an answer as to how soulmates were chosen or connected or how they were capable of communicating by writing on their shared skin that hadn’t stopped Riley’s parents from encouraging them from speaking. It was important to Riley that they grow up together, to share their thoughts and so it had been important to her as well.

_The gentle scuff of shoes on the rubbery turf of the dorms buildings drew her attention away from the crowd assembling below. Without looking she knows who it is, the only person it could be. She knows that they had climbed the side of the building with the skill one only acquired if they spent their entire life climbing things that they had been explicitly told not to climb, someone who didn’t believe in the myth that it was impossible to scale brick because the mortar didn’t provide enough of a space between them to get traction. She knows that the person drawing up slowly behind her had figured out very young that it was possible to actually walk up palm trees, a brick building was easy potatoes beside that, especially if you had a very good reason for getting on top of that building._

_Kate’s arms are as silent as the crowd below her is loud, the collective roar of whispers and car tires on gravel as the police arrive. It’s almost funny that they think a police officer can talk her down off the ledge, she would be as deaf to them as her classmates had been to the depths of her despair until this moment. No new markings had appeared for a week, not since the night of the party when her world had ended, nothing but a blank expanse of pale skin where once they had been littered with little reminders and messages and equations and doodles. It had encouraged her classmates to lean harder against her, oblivious in the invisible strove tide of accepted social practices performed by others ignorant to the harm they were capable of._

_Where their words should have cut deeper she had clung to the two words scrawled in hasty sharpie across her left hip when she’d reawaken to the nightmare her life had become. An unbreakable promise that had taken a week to fulfill, a living dream where the carefully pleasant veneer of small town life had come crumbling down around Arcadia Bay to reveal the truth lurking beneath. A beast with two heads and malice in its heart and eyes prowling the corridors, choosing its victims carefully until it hadn’t, meticulous and unseen until it was. A manhunt brought to an end in a single day as a decade of victimized women stepped forward into the light knowing what the world would make of them._

_“I’m coming.” It was all that she had needed to stay strong, to speak to the authorities, but it hadn’t been enough to see her through until the end. She doesn’t know what to expect when she turns around, not really, she’s never met this stranger face to face but she knows this person better than she knows herself._

_The crowd below is getting restless, its wilder elements smelling blood in the air, feeling the call of tragedy and the urge to bring it forth into the world. The side of human nature only revealed in the anonymity of the crowd working itself into a frenzy before the steps of the Prescott Dorms unable to voice its desires as the faculty and police force them back. Like a dog straining at the end of a least held taunt, waiting for the last stimuli that would be the catalyst to destruction. The police below in their crisp uniforms thought that they would be her salvation but they were wrong, they had waited too long and her salvation had climbed up behind them all to join her on the precipice._

_“Please turn around.” The words were shaky, written with a trembling hand across the whole of her left forearm. She stiffens but doesn’t move, doesn’t turn, afraid of what she will find._

Kate first learns of her soulmate’s existence when she’s three. She’s just woken up from a nap in the den under the watchful eye of her babysitter when she notices the blue Crayola marker on her arm, doodles of turtles and letters crudely drawn with a childish hand. Her parents don’t let her use anything but crayons and her baby sister is too young to do much more than sleep and cry most days. It’s not her work, her mommy had made it very clear that her babysitter Sarah wasn’t allowed to give Kate markers for any reason though Sarah keeps a magic marker in her pocket to talk to her soulmate Greg.

She knows what the marks mean in that vague way that children know the world, that they are the work of someone very special chosen for everyone on Earth before they are born by God. Her parents say that her someone special won’t reach out to her until she’s older like Sarah but they’re wrong, Sarah had said so. Sarah had said that it meant that her soulmate was older than she was but not by much and that she wasn’t allowed to write back just yet.

It isn’t until she is much older that she learns why, they tell her at bible study that it isn’t safe to share personal information with their soulmate until they’re older. They tell her that some very bad people kidnapped children and found their soulmates by the messages they wrote, they said that while God had made it so that everyone had a soulmate, someone special just for them, the Devil had made it so that everyone could see what was written on their shared skins. It isn’t until Kate is seventeen that the full horror of this is made clear to her in the most visceral of ways.

Her daddy says that her soul mate is irreverent, an uncaring person with uncaring parents who allowed him to use their shared skin like paper. She doesn’t think that her soulmate knows what paper is, her forearms and skins riddled with drawings and words and numbers. When she takes a magic marker from the drawer in the kitchen when Sarah isn’t watching months later she isn’t thinking of the consequences, her soulmate had written a word she understood and she wanted to write it back. When she does it doesn’t take her soulmate long to find out that she doesn’t know her alphabet yet so her soulmate uses their right forearm to write messages and their left to write big letters for her to trace.

Her parents would say that they had been diligent in their instruction teaching Kate the alphabet but it had been her soulmate who had first taught her letters and how to read first in English and then again in French. Her parents never wonder why she had learned the language so easily, why she had been able to read, write, and understand before she could speak but that hadn’t been as important to them as their mission trips. They didn’t care that Riley was Canadian, they’d never asked. It had never occurred to them to ask just as it had never occurred to them to ask whether Riley was a boy or a girl.

_Kate doesn’t remember coming down from the roof, she doesn’t remember being pulled into strong arms and held until the police officer’s boots had crunched on the gravel and sand accumulated on the roof by years of storms. She doesn’t remember anything but strong arms around her holding her as securely as the earth’s pull beneath their feet held them but she does remember the argument that followed. A tirade that had begun in English and quickly devolved into a flurry of increasingly creative insults in French rising in volume until the unmistakable “command voices” of the police had put an end to it all. She remembers a harsh bark in French overriding her parents concerns, invoking archaic laws that no one had taken off the books that gave soulmates first privilege over even close families as long as one was of age and Riley certainly was of age. She remembers being herded into a late model truck and driven out of town to a hotel and up to a room on the third floor._

_Riley is there with her and that’s all that matters, something mindless on the television to drown out the thoughts in her head and room service politely knocking on the door. She eats mechanically a modest meal bowl of something that was mostly rice and ginger to soothe her nerves and sipping hot tea while the sharp bitter scent of coffee fills her nose. Riley doesn’t say anything, just sits beside her on the end of the bed close enough that she can feel the warmth radiating from her soulmate and sips at what must be the fifth or sixth cup of coffee her soulmate has downed today. She knows that Riley has an addiction to caffeine and prefers it in the form of black coffee rather._

Kate notices something profound about Riley when she is seven but doesn’t have words for it for eight more years, for the casual disregard Riley has for physical injuries though the vague impression of the worse of the bruising doesn’t show upon her skin until she is fourteen and Riley is seventeen. She’d known that Riley was the only girl of seven boys, the endless lamentations of the ridiculous and irresponsible actions of her brothers is a tale that could fill several books if she put words to paper as casually as Riley put them on their skin, so the occasional accidents happened and showed quite spectacularly but actual fighting with real world stakes was something that had begun to escalate. The words in bold sharpie appearing on their skin _‘don’t worry I won’_ always heartening to some extent.

She doesn’t press the issue until she starts to attend Blackwell where there is no one to inspect her arms at the end of the day at dinner where she can’t conceivably excuse herself. To use Chloe’s turn of phrase Riley was trained to go and ready to take flight at the slightest provocation, ready and willing and able to fight at the drop of the hat. She doesn’t appreciate what that means until much later, when she’s nineteen and her case finally goes to court.

**Author's Note:**

> So this is probably going to get longer, going through the scraps of things on my computer and I'm finding pay dirt that I haven't capitalized on for what I can only assume are... reasons.


End file.
